Cast The First Stone When The New Life Redemption Church's decrepit bus kills the town drunk's wife and daughter, the man sues the church. However, justice is an uneven thing. After Robert Goodman loses in court, he takes justice into his own hands. In a cross between Dog Day Afternoon and The Apostle, he takes the congregation hostage. On a sweltering summer evening, as the police ring the clapboard building, he gives an altar call at the point of a gun. "Are there twenty who will die, so the rest may live?" he asks. "Are there ten?" "Are there five?" This story explores how the human spirit survives the unfathomable. Hypocrisy is bared. Some find it soothes their conscience to dismiss Goodman as a deranged psychotic. Yet, Calley Haskell, who pens letters of hate to the killer of her daughter, gradually discovers that in many ways she is not so different from Robert Goodman. Cast the First Stone is a story of judgment and condemnation, love and hate, justice and revenge. It is a tale of people who commit sins of omission and ones of commission, of people who find peace and those who fail to do so. It is about alienation and reconciliation, of violence to the heart, and finding forgiveness within the heart. This is not a theological book, it might have been set in a prisoner of war camp, or during a prison take over, however the church is a wonderfully simple place for exploring hypocrisy, after all most people will not die for their political beliefs. In the end this book is a tale of life. The characters struggle. They do not all have a happy ending. Some fail to ever understand themselves while others succeed in discovering themselves.
